Margaret McRorie

The HUMAINE Database: Addressing the Collection and Annotation of Naturalistic and Induced Emotional Data

The HUMAINE project is concerned with developing interfaces that will register and respond to emotion, particularly pervasive emotion (forms of feeling, expression and action that colour most of human life). The HUMAINE Database provides naturalistic clips which record that kind of material, in multiple modalities, and labelling techniques that are suited to describing it.

The Belfast Induced Natural Emotion Database

For many years psychological research on facial expression of emotion has relied heavily on a recognition paradigm based on posed static photographs. There is growing evidence that there may be fundamental differences between the expressions depicted in such stimuli and the emotional expressions present in everyday life. Affective computing, with its pragmatic emphasis on realism, needs examples of natural emotion. This paper describes a unique database containing recordings of mild to moderate emotionally colored responses to a series of laboratory-based emotion induction tasks. The recordings are accompanied by information on self-report of emotion and intensity, continuous trace-style ratings of valence and intensity, the sex of the participant, the sex of the experimenter, the active or passive nature of the induction task, and it gives researchers the opportunity to compare expressions from people from more than one culture.

Cross-Cultural Patterns in Dynamic Ratings of Positive and Negative Natural Emotional Behaviour

Background Studies of cross-cultural variations in the perception of emotion have typically compared rates of recognition of static posed stimulus photographs. That research has provided evidence for universality in the recognition of a range of emotions but also for some systematic cross-cultural variation in the interpretation of emotional expression. However, questions remain about how widely such findings can be generalised to real life emotional situations. The present study provides the first evidence that the previously reported interplay between universal and cultural influences extends to ratings of natural, dynamic emotional stimuli. Methodology/Principal Findings Participants from Northern Ireland, Serbia, Guatemala and Peru used a computer based tool to continuously rate the strength of positive and negative emotion being displayed in twelve short video sequences by people from the United Kingdom engaged in emotional conversations. Generalized additive mixed models were developed to assess the differences in perception of emotion between countries and sexes. Our results indicate that the temporal pattern of ratings is similar across cultures for a range of emotions and social contexts. However, there are systematic differences in intensity ratings between the countries, with participants from Northern Ireland making the most extreme ratings in the majority of the clips. Conclusions/Significance The results indicate that there is strong agreement across cultures in the valence and patterns of ratings of natural emotional situations but that participants from different cultures show systematic variation in the intensity with which they rate emotion. Results are discussed in terms of both ‘in-group advantage’ and ‘display rules’ approaches. This study indicates that examples of natural spontaneous emotional behaviour can be used to study cross-cultural variations in the perception of emotion.

The HUMAINE Database

The HUMAINE Database is grounded in HUMAINE’s core emphasis on considering emotion in a broad sense – ‘pervasive emotion’ – and engaging with the way it colours action and interaction. The aim of the database is to provide a resource to which the community can go to see and hear the forms that emotion takes in everyday action and interaction, and to look at the tools that might be relevant to describing it. Earlier chapters in this handbook describe the techniques and models underpinning the collection and labelling of such data. This chapter focuses on conveying the range of forms that emotion takes in the database, the ways that they can be labelled and the issues that the data raises. The HUMAINE Database provides naturalistic clips which record that kind of material, in multiple modalities, and labelling techniques that are suited to describing it. It was clear when the HUMAINE project began that work on databases should form part of it. However there were very different directions that the work might have taken. They were encapsulated early on in the contrast between ‘supportive’ and ‘provocative’ approaches, introduced in an earlier chapter in this handbook. The supportive option was to assemble a body of data whose size and structure allowed it to be used directly to build systems for recognition and/or synthesis. The provocative option was to assemble a body of data that encapsulated the challenges that the field faces.

Issues in Data Collection

The chapter reviews methods of obtaining records that show signs of emotion. Concern with authenticity is central to the task. Converging lines of argument indicate that even sophisticated acting does not reproduce emotion as it appears in everyday action and interaction. Acting is the appropriate source for some kinds of material, and work on that topic is described. Methods that aim for complete naturalism are also described, and the problems associated with them are noted. Techniques for inducing emotion are considered under five headings: classical induction; physical induction; games; task settings; and conversational interactions. The ethical issues that affect area are outlined, and a framework for dealing with them is set out.

Gender differences in the role of emotional intelligence during the primary-secondary school transition

The relationship between components of emotional intelligence (EI) (interpersonal ability, intrapersonal ability, adaptability and stress management) and academic performance in English, maths and science was examined in a sample of 86 children (49 males and 37 females) aged 11–12 years during the primary–secondary school transition period. Results indicated that for both males and females, intrapersonal ability had little relationship with academic achievement, while adaptability had the strongest relationship with achievement in all subjects. Gender differences were particularly pronounced for science, for which stronger relationships were observed with all EI components for males. In addition, apparent only for males was a negative relationship between stress management and science. These findings offer support for the current inclusion of a personal and emotional element in the primary school curriculum, and indicate that such training is likely to help males more than females to make a successful transition from primary to secondary school.

Neural transmission and general mental ability.

Abstract Galton (1883, Inquiries into Human Faculty. London: Dent) hypothesized that higher intelligence (IQ) is a consequence of greater mental speed, which is reflected by shorter reaction times (RT). Contemporary interest in such proposals has relied on very few experimental paradigms, and these have been criticized on methodological grounds. In aiming to address these problems, this study examines correlations between mental ability and speed of nerve conduction in the patellar reflex arc. Preliminary results of a pilot study (gathered to test the equipment) are reported.